Microsoft Research TechFest 2010: NUI and the cloud dominate

Microsoft's annual TechFest is like a look into Microsoft's brain—researchers …

Microsoft Research's TechFest is essentially a glimpse into a Microsoft future. It's an annual showcase of the various technologies that the company's researchers have been working on. The 2010 event that took place earlier this month featured a few prototypes that we've already seen before, but there were also many that have only just started to emerge out of Microsoft's research labs around the world, including labs in China, India, the UK, and the US.

The gathering of hundreds of researchers, as well as the broader group of Microsoft employees and product managers, happens at the company's headquarters in Redmond and creates a sort of forum for these colleagues to exchange ideas, show off their latest innovations, and form partnerships that lead to the creation of shipping products (even though most don't make the cut). Here's this year's keynote:

Compared to last year, there were significantly fewer research projects officially showcased (17 versus 35), though we're sure that there were actually many more that weren't publicized. Here's a quick rundown of the 17 official ones, accompanied by links that will let you further explore if your interest is piqued. Some information will overlap due to researchers working on multiple projects, and some areas will have significantly less information as some technologies aren't as far along. The list isn't in any particular order, so use the table of contents below and have a look around based on what catches your eye. Remember that these are concepts and prototypes, not finished products, and they may never end up becoming anything beyond demos.

This team was inspired by novel interaction modalities that Microsoft has developed recently, such as the Microsoft Surface and Project Natal. They took these modalities that rely on sensors and devices situated in the environment and tried to bring them over to the mobile experience. Then they added new modalities specific to mobile. The group attempted to take advantage of sensing technologies that decode signals generated by the human body with various demos: muscle-computer interfaces, electromyography-based armbands that sense muscular activation to infer finger gestures on surfaces and in free space, as well as bio-acoustic interfaces, mechanical sensors on the body that turn the entire body into a tap-based input device.

Project Gustav: Immersive Digital Painting

This team looked at Microsoft Paint and figured there was room for improvement. Gustav is a realistic painting-system prototype that tries to immerse the user in the digital painting experience with a natural interface that makes it ideal for hobbyists and professional artists alike. Gustav achieves a high level of interactivity and realism by leveraging the computing power of modern GPUs, while also taking advantage of multitouch and tablet input technology. In addition, the group included natural media-modeling and brush-simulation algorithms as well as convincingly realistic models for pastel and oil-media in its prototype. They say this is just the beginning and there is more to come.

New Technologies for Multi-Image Fusion

This group looked at photo-stitching and video-stitching and saw an opportunity. Looking at the number of pictures and videos taken by the average person, and seeing how ubiquitous video and still cameras have become, they figured that there needs to be a better way to combine this content (if this sounds familiar to you, that's because Microsoft is obsessed with this concept and has many different related projects). They noted that taking a large set of content and creating an image with a large field of view, a panorama, or a composite image that takes the best parts of the image, a photo montage, is not so easy for many users. The main challenge is the time it takes to capture and stitch, but there are also problems like motion blur and choosing the right image sets from many photos or videos to produce the best results. Thus, the team presented several new technologies that attempt to improve the user experience: for panorama generation, they demonstrated ICE 2.0 stitching panoramas from video and generating sharp panoramas from blurry videos. For generating composites, they showed off video to snapshots as well as de-noising and sharpening using lucky imaging.

These three researchers showed two solutions that enable financial-service delivery to low-income individuals by integrating the use of portable digital devices with paper-based tools that cost little and are widely used in developing countries. The first solution focuses on improving microfinance-record management through the use of pen-and-paper-based input on a low-cost digital slate device. Handwritten data on paper is digitized and processed simultaneously to provide instant user feedback, delivering gains in data quality and process efficiency. The second solution addresses a security concern in mobile-phone-based banking transactions. Paper is used to facilitate secure PIN entry on mobile phones and to achieve a suitable tradeoff between security and usability in phone-assisted banking.

I'm on Windows and I don't particularly want Silverlight. I'm annoyed enough with Flash; the last thing I want is yet another attack vector, yet another bloody runtime sucking down memory and CPU.

Which is actually quite tragic, since I quite like Silverlight from a technological perspective; it beats the crap out of Flash. I just don't want to see Flash displaced by HTML 5 only to be replaced by Silverlight.

Interesting. But can Microsoft turn these concept into shipping products, that will actually simplify and/or enrich the life of ordinary people, or improve business processes? Sadly, based on previous MS innovations that never really took off, we are not likely to benefit any time soon from such research.

Gotta love those muppets from Microsoft. "Siverlight is 4Mb and takes 10 seconds to install". So I click. "QUICK DOWNLOAD / 30 SECOND INSTALL Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on your computer's hardware or operating system. "

Suggestion to Ars : Don't use Silverlight and put a image preview if you really need to...

"Thus, the team built a system where a desktop goes to sleep when not in use but can still awaken seamlessly when the user tries to access it. The system, which consists of a sleep server that maintains the network presence of the sleeping machine, does not require special hardware or changes to existing software. "

Well done Microsoft. You've re-discovered Wake On Lan. Have you looking at Linux and Snow Leopard again...?

Seriously ars, Silverlight video? Just no. Given that the market share of html5-capable browsers is probably somewhat comparable to the market share of silverlight-capable browsers (especially on ars), why would ever consider silverlight over html5? You had 3 options: flash (sucks, but works for everyone), html 5 (rocks, but only works for some), and silverlight (sucks, and only works for some). You managed to pick the WORST of the 3 available options.

....I take that back. You could've embedded a quicktime or real video. But that wouldn't have been MUCH worse.

Seriously ars, Silverlight video? Just no. Given that the market share of html5-capable browsers is probably somewhat comparable to the market share of silverlight-capable browsers (especially on ars), why would ever consider silverlight over html5? You had 3 options: flash (sucks, but works for everyone), html 5 (rocks, but only works for some), and silverlight (sucks, and only works for some). You managed to pick the WORST of the 3 available options.

....I take that back. You could've embedded a quicktime or real video. But that wouldn't have been MUCH worse.

Yeah its a bit quicker to use the video format provided instead of downloading the raw video file then embedding it in a different format.15 seconds vs 20 minutes

And the baseless bashing of Silverlight is getting quite rediculous tbh.

Considering tests have shown HTML5 isn't much better on resources then flash is. And silverlight by far is the best for video delivery.

Funny, I didn't even notice which format the videos were in, except idly noting that they seemed smoother than usual. I did wonder if ARS was using HTML5 video, but didn't think much about it. Maybe that's because I've kept on top of emerging technology and have a browser that's capable of displaying all extant video delivery methods. Oh well, I guess I just like things to work smoothly or something.

I think this article really does demonstrate the value of blue sky research labs. Many of the ideas here won't ever see the light of day in the form they're in now, but the ideas are out there and will be used at some point. I've been impressed with Microsoft lately, they really seem to be interested in pushing usability and getting usable technology into as many hands as possible.

Considering tests have shown HTML5 isn't much better on resources then flash is.

Maybe on windows. This is a tech site. Plenty of us use linux/mac/other. My own tests based on youtube put html5's cpu usage at about 1/5th of flash

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And silverlight by far is the best for video delivery.

By what metric? Certainly not in terms of % of audience capable of playing it. Given the age of flash, certainly not in terms of the # of tools available for generating it.

I actually don't hate silverlight from a purely technical standpoint. I *wish* the gnome world would fully embrace mono. But IME it works rather poorly for video, I don't want one more plugin to make firefox even more unstable than it is, and I certainly think there are far better alternatives by any metric I can imagine.

Aren't the people who bash Silverlight (yet accept Flash hegemony) more or less the same people who usually want IE to die a painful death so there can be competition in the browser market?

Flash is more annoying than IE8 (which, incidentally, I don't use because at work I'm stuck with 7, and at home I use Chrome). Having more than 2 or 3 Flash videos loading/playing even in separate tabs, cripples my PC and has resulted in Flash simply crashing more than once.

Yes, it's a shame Silverlight support in OS's other than Windows is sub-par. That's bound to change with MS making it a core technology, as seen in the Zune HD and WP7S. In the mean time, Silverlight works way better than Flash for streaming video, in my experience.

Yes, it's a shame Silverlight support in OS's other than Windows is sub-par. That's bound to change with MS making it a core technology, as seen in the Zune HD and WP7S. In the mean time, Silverlight works way better than Flash for streaming video, in my experience.

I highly doubt that, they want to create a nice an cozy Microsoft world only development platform (just like they always do), and have it marginally good enough for them to claim cross platform support. If Microsoft makes their DRM usable on platforms besides Mac or Windows I will believe they actually want wide adoption, until then, they can keep their shinny technology.

Also, I highly doubt Silverlight is any more speed efficient then the latest hardware accelerated flash video playback.

Silverlight FTW! NCAA Tournament looks fantastic in HD. Now about the article... Kinda seems like the last thing Microsoft should have done is cut back in the R&D, especially with the ridiculous amount of new apps, phones, and gadgets. There is tons of new hardware out there but it has already been demonstrated that the applications/usability is obviously the determining factor when consumers go to market. MSFT also needs to improve their R&D-to-Consumers marketing and availability.

Aren't the people who bash Silverlight (yet accept Flash hegemony) more or less the same people who usually want IE to die a painful death so there can be competition in the browser market?

I don't know about others, but I don't think the flash hegemony is great either. The point is, at least flash supports most ars browsers. Silverlight has several major disadvantages, while offering practically no advantages for most users (if any, as pointed out, hardward-accelerated flash may indeed be even faster than silverlight). As for IE, I don't care if it dies or not as long as it becomes standards compliant.

I am disappointed with the writing in this article. Reading it was boring, like the endless PowerPoint presentations I have to sit through at work in that falsetto corporate speak ("novel interaction modalities" etc) that people think makes their presentation sound smarter, but is mostly just babble.

Interesting. But can Microsoft turn these concept into shipping products, that will actually simplify and/or enrich the life of ordinary people, or improve business processes? Sadly, based on previous MS innovations that never really took off, we are not likely to benefit any time soon from such research.

For every huge market fumble such as Surface (seriously MS, you had gold and you turned it into lead) they have something like Photosynth which has been used amazingly well in Bing Maps. Like much research in general little is commercialized in a year, or two years - the point is to get a glimps of possible visions of the future to work towards. From the sounds of it, it looks like things like the DCTCP were already in the pipeline with MS data centers, and many of the photosynth improvements were just made available or were definitely in the pipeline.

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Microsoft Research Catch-Up Fest 2010

And what, exactly, is the overlap with existing technology that they were catching up to? Did you actually examine *any* of the presentations, or did you just want to just jump straight into announcing your ignorance?

My big complaint with many of these is that they amount to abstracts in scientific papers. The CloudFaster research *could* be very interesting, but without talk about what specific issues in TCP they were addressing and how it amounts to them announcing "We have created network magic". Some of the presentations stand fine on gee-wiz, that's cool factor (for example, the speed that composit photos are put together - that is quite cool), but the less front end stuff really would benefit from some technical discussion.

I was only able to get one of them to play on Moonlight. On page 2, they all showed a warning on load that said they were Silverlight 3 applications and I may experience incompatibilities. I didn't bother loading page 3.

Only thing that´s a bit unnerving are all the Mac/Linux zealots who refuse to install SL because... well... it´s from MS, hence it must be bad. Or something. SL *is* the best way to deliver streaming video currently, and if HTML5 runs better than Flash on your OS, that´s because Flash on your OS sucked. Easy as that.

Only thing that´s a bit unnerving are all the Mac/Linux zealots who refuse to install SL because... well... it´s from MS, hence it must be bad. Or something. SL *is* the best way to deliver streaming video currently, and if HTML5 runs better than Flash on your OS, that´s because Flash on your OS sucked. Easy as that.

No, actually. Both myself and another user on this thread have installed moonlight. That user was able to one of the videos to play, but not the others. I was unable to get any to play at all. And yet again, *why* is silverlight the best solution? It certainly doesn't run on more platforms, it'd be very hard to imagine that it's actually easier to create/manage videos with, etc. Who is it benefiting?

So the options for the author were: a)Download the videos, post as Flash. b)Download the videos, post as HTML5, except Firefox can't play H.264 videos and Safari can't play Theora, and IE8 can play neither. c)Simply link to the original Silverlight videos. Yeah, the choice is going to be "c'", every time. Install the Silverlight/Moonlight plugin, or just get over it.

Only thing that´s a bit unnerving are all the Mac/Linux zealots who refuse to install SL because... well... it´s from MS

I installed Moonlight, but it doesn't seem like it makes much difference. Ever since Moonlight has come out, it seems like the rare times I come across Silverlight content, more often than not it will not work for me. And of course, it only works on Linux/x86 and Linux/amd64 as far as I know.

Whatever brilliance is born in Microsoft R&D is then filtered through and molested by the company's layers of middle mis-management and marketing droids, becoming laughable trinkets with half their initial functionality. I hate to sound like a broken record, but unless Microsoft trims the management fat (and ejects that buffoon Balmer out of the executive suite), they continue their tailspin to becoming the next Commodore.